Almost a year ago, a refurbished hard drive I had newly received under warranty became completely inaccessible through normal means. I had transferred over 1.5 TB of data to it, and sadly did not back it up elsewhere. However, the data on the drive was shown to be occupied through viewing the basic hard drive properties, and after running Seagate Recovery Suite, all of the data was shown to still be there and usable. However, I didn't do anything with it because I wanted back all of the data with things like the modification dates preserved, and that requires payed software, and for various other reasons, I've left the drive alone almost all this time.

The drive I've been using now (which I bought several years ago, but went awhile without using it until this happened) is likely having issues, and I'm going to reformat. What's been holding me back is the scan of the inaccessible drive I made with Seagate Recovery Suite. When I've reinserted the faulty drive and reaccessed it with Seagate Recovery Suite, the full scan becomes accessible again. I'm sure this would be lost if I were to reformat. I know this technically makes no difference (and the less I touch that drive until I get around to transferring the data off, the better), but it would be nice to still have that scan under SRS.

Is there any way, at all, of saving this scan so I could reaccess it elsewhere with SRS? And it goes without saying, but this is the free trial of SRS. Not sure if this would be possible even if I had the full version though.

I did never use SRS but as you mentioned if you re-open the drive and it "remembers" the last full scan then this "map" or "scan of partition layout" has to be "saved" somewhere !

When you use other Logic Recovery tools like Restorer 2000 it asks you to save that layout when you finish the scan or close the app.

Maybe you can try to "play" with SRS with a bunch of small drives of flash disks and see where it saves the file with the information from the scan. Hopefull it will not save just the last scan. If you can find where those files are you can move them to another machine, hopefully !

Also apart from that you can try other logic data recovery tools like R-Studio or GetDataBack but you should do that only when you are ready to recover the data to another drive.

Well, I did end up calling SRS data recovery and they were pretty adamant I couldn't save a copy of a scan. I still find it kind of hard to believe it's impossible though, especially since you seem to imply this is possible with other software- though when you refer to Restorer 2000, I'm not sure if you're referring to the ability to transfer it between drives in that case.

I don't really have much of any extra drives to test with though, but I am a little wary about basically gambling by saving the entire SRS folder elsewhere, reformatting, and see if it saves anything. I did manage to stave off the issues I was having with this drive recently though, and it seems to be working fine- for now. It would be nice if I could have this copy of the SRS scan on my drive while I scan the inaccessible drive with a better program, but at this point, I don't know what to go with, and I don't know if it would be totally safe to scan that drive from this one given the issues I've had with this.

I've been kind of torn on what recovery program to go ahead with next, since what I'm particularly interested in is saving the original file/folder order and the original modification dates. That only seems possible with payed programs, and I've leaned towards R-Studio for awhile, but I've heard good things about GetDataBack too. The only free recovery program I think that might be able to retain modification dates and such is Ubuntu Live CD, but that seems to rely heavily on command lines and I'm not sure how effective it would be.

That software is a "cheap" alternative to R-Studio and it's heavly based on it but still not free.

I'm talking about you have a drive that you did format or have a damaged file alocation table and you do a full drive scan or full partition scan so that you are going to try either a raw recovery or to get the file/folder listing. Now let's assume you have a big drive and you run the full scan for hours and you do get the files listed with correct folder structure. If you don't have at that time another drive to save files to or if you need to power off the system or whatever you can save that "scan" results as a file so next time you try restorer to get the data you don't have to do the full scan again, you can just open the file that you saved with the scan results and it will load to the software. You can even move that file to another computer and open it there and try to recover data from your damage drive (you have to move the drive as well of course).

Also this will NOT WORK as expected if you write data to the drive you want to recover or if you change the drive in any way as the scan results are made with the drive on a particular state and if you start writting or changing data you have to re-scan.

Well, just send the drive you want to recover to someone with proper tools like hardware based imager and at this point it shouldn't be an expensive recovery. This is the best option for you instead of playing with recovery software that might end up killing the drive heads for good and making your recovery way more expensive....

What is Restorer 2000 lacking compared to R-Studio? I've also been told SRS is a scaled down version of R-Studio, despite being more expensive.

So you're telling me I can transfer the scan to another drive, and access the "damaged" drive from that drive using Restorer 2000, and possibly R-Studio? That's really good to know that that feature is found with other software, but the support from Seagate seemed clear this wasn't possible with SRS. It even seemed to go beyond the fact I ran the scan with a trial copy, it was supposedly impossible for the software to do this. But I don't know- what file or sub-folder, if any, might contain a scan of the copy in the SRS folder?

I have been wary of sending the drive out myself because I've had experience with HD recovery in the past a number of years ago, and even when I had to recover a drive with under 200 GB of data, it ended up costing something like $150. For comparison, this one is 1.4 TB. There's also some sensitive personal data on there I'd like to handle on my own. That's why I've leaned towards using software, since it seems like I could get this done for under $100, and I've had success with using SRS' trial, and even recovering a bit of data using free software (which resets the modification dates and likely doesn't preserve original file/folder structure).

I haven't done much of anything with the drive in months, but I've learned that's a bad idea since a drive has to be running periodically- thankfully, the data under the preserved scan came up fine when I put it in a few weeks ago. I've also had it in anti-static bag all this time. How could I damage the drive heads though? I know not to keep using recovery software with this though. The only scan software I've run for any significant period has been SRS.

If you are so concearned about this and if the data is important to you then the best that you can do by now if you don't want to re-do the scan is to get another drive and copy the data out of the damaged one using the copy of SRS that you are using ...

As soon as you do that as soon you will stop thinking about it.

If you can't do that now and you do have to use another computer later go for a cheaper alternative to SRS like restorer. Even if you have to re-do the full scan the drive can still survive (or not).

If i were you i would get the data as fast as i could and i wouldn't be thinking more about the issue.

Of course that i would start by checking the bad drive first.

What is the full model ? Do you have a S.M.A.R.T. attributes screen capture of it ? What does apear to be the problem ? Does the drive clicks ?

Maybe it would had been better to clone/image that drive to another one first unless you only need a very small amount of files that you can diretly extract with recovery software ?

At this point we don't even know if SRS will be able to recover the data ...

And DO NOT COPY IT to the damjaged drive, assuming that you can still write to the partitions ....

I wouldn't really mind redoing the scan, and if I were to, it would be with other software for sure, especially since there's cheaper, better options. I just would if possible like to possibly transfer the scan I performed with SRS to another drive. Seagate support claimed this wasn't possible.

This is a previous thread describing my issues in further detail. Since the drive is still sitting there, it hasn't changed much. No clicks though. And never did a S.M.A.R.T. attributes screen capture, but I'm not familiar with that.viewtopic.php?f=1&t=35145

I'm not concerned that SRS or other recovery software won't be able to recover the data- again, it's just being sure right now if the SRS scan can transfer the data. If I do this from another hard drive, or a clean format of this drive, I would just like to have that scan and be able to check it as a measure of certainty/reassurance.

I could scan from this drive as it stands, but I'm not 100% if that's the best idea given the state it's in. It seems to be fine now though, and a lot of that was tied to a very bad habit I've had of having too many tabs open at once, I think. Though it might be risky on even a clean format, since this drive is pretty old- I actually got it in mid 2012 (it hasn't be continuously in use that entire time though.) I imagine it should be able to handle a day or so of scanning and data transfer, but it does make me wonder.

Really don't know much about cloning, and I'd probably be most comfortable just using recovery software. I'm still not sure what to go with though. Most likely not SRS (price, unable to retain modification dates and possibly folder/file structure), and as I said, I've been leaning towards R-Studio, especially since SRS, I've been told, is basically a scaled back version of it. How does it truly compare though, along with Restorer 2000? And what about Ubuntu Live CD?

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